Jon Scieszka in person is more fun than the Time Warp Trio boys all rolled into one. He walks at a run, greets you with a mile-wide smile, and talks reflectively about a wide range of issues, always with his characteristic humor.

Scieszka burst onto the children’s literature scene in 1989 with the low-down on the absolutely True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, as told by A.Wolf. He quickly followed it with the Stinky Cheese Man in which he pokes fun at the rest of the nursery stories’ icons. Those first two hugely successful books enabled him to concentrate fulltime on writing, something most authors only dream of doing.

The Time Warp Trio, a super time travel series featuring three highly authentic boys, who Scieszka allows bear some similarity to him and two of his five brothers, came next. Scieszka is so concerned about boys’ reading that he founded a literacy initiative called guysread.com dedicated to boys’ literacy needs. He believes boys often fail to get a fair literacy shake starting from an early age because of the material selected for them. Why is that?

Scieszka explains that it is basically women who do the selecting of children’s books because overwhelmingly early childhood and grade school teachers as well as librarians are female. "Think about it," says this product of a parochial school upbringing, "Women make the initial reading choices, and many of the books which appeal to girls do not appeal to boys. Boys like action, trucks, bulldozers…" Whoa there. After all Jon Scieszka is the very first United States laureate of children’s literature, sponsored by the Library of Congress no less, going on the record saying there are some innate gender differences so powerful that they may influence who excels in literacy, who forges ahead, and who might get left behind.

"Please," I ask, "tell me how you get by with talking like this? You’ re saying that the gatekeepers of children’s literacy unintentionally stack the deck; that there are innate gender differences – nobody has talked like this for nearly 40 years except Larry Summers, and his head rolled out of the Harvard President’s chair. Please tell me how you can say this?"

"It may be the approach," Scieszka laughs, "I just ask you to think about what kind of reading material might be fascinating to a lot of boys, that’s all. When I talk with boys I tell them ‘Read whatever you want to read. I don’t care if it’s comics, or what it is so long as you read.’"

I had this conversation with Jon Scieszka at the 2008 Miami International Book Festival and spent months thinking about his theory, and questioning the breadth of my choices. As a result of talking with him I try to be sure to consider whether a book will appeal to both boys and girls, and to choose with the knowledge that some books will likely appeal to many more girls, and some will likely appeal to many more boys, and some will appeal to both genders quite equally.

We have a review of Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!, and the first of the Time Warp Trio series (we heartily recommend them all) on our backlist; and a review of his new Truckery Rhymes on our 2009 frontlist. Whether Jon Scieszka created Truckery Rhymes primarily for the guys, I am certain that it will be gender neutral with little listeners and readalouders alike.

In September 2009, Denise Doyen put out a call inviting all poetry and read-aloud artists to enter her "Once Upon a Twice" recitation contest on YouTube, and in so doing merged a 19th and early 20th Century tradition with 21st Century technology. (In the past, a child learned, interpreted and recited a poem or other "piece" in a classroom; now, Doyen invited children to interpret and recite her outstanding new book Once Upon a Twice for all the world to see and hear.) The successful contest demonstrated that today’s children are as interested in learning and reciting a great poem or story as were children in times past.

Once Upon a Twice, reviewed on our frontlist for children ages 3 and over, exemplifies Doyen’s philosophy of children’s literature. She says, "We should aim high and share the best texts we can find in order to pass on a love of poetry, writing, reading and language." Doyen believes "It’s important to have simple, easy, sunny books for children AND complicated, challenging, darker books for children as well. What children can learn and incorporate by simply listening to a tale is amazing; their sponge-like brains get a sense of the power of words, the power of rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, meter and all the rest that a poem can offer up--just by hearing an impassioned reading of Jabberwocky or Casey at the Bat or Madeline or (I truly hope) Once Upon a Twice. That exposure to children’s literature is a great gift for developing minds…."

We at the Read Aloud Review believe that a child exposed to Once Upon a Twice is given a great gift by Denise Doyen, whose dedication to quality, and to encouraging full participation in her creation, may profoundly influence a child’s lifelong appreciation and love of literature.